In the past I mentioned some Pros and Cons of Jungledisk and Amanda and the one listed “con” for Amanda is that it periodically had issues with my buckets and the size of data stored therein.
It turns out that there was a bug with the Amanda S3 device: it had issues with buckets that had a lot of keys (files) in it. Due to the way Amanda works it makes one gig pieces of data on the holding disk and then the S3 device chunks them up smaller and puts them on the S3 device. When the tape/bucket was due to be resused the files in it had to be removed. Fetching the key list (file list) that could be rm’d had a buffer overflow.
I found this out with the awesome help of djmitche (and Freenode #amanda) who wrote a patch for me. I’m pretty sure the patch made its way into amanda trunk. In Gentoo the patch is in app-backup/amanda-2.6.0_p2-r1.
Since applying the patch I’ve had no problems with Amanda at all and it’s run perfectly for me.
Great follow-up, thanks. I was looking for an s3-based backup solution for my colo’d box and I think this is it.
-m
Comment by max — November 1, 2008 @ 22:48
Glad that worked out for you. If you run into any other Amanda trouble, or want to hack on the cloud support, let me know. We started a more general cloud storage library – http://github.com/zmanda/libzcloud/ – but nobody’s had the time to work on it recently.
Comment by Dustin J. Mitchell — January 7, 2010 @ 20:02